June 8 marked World IPv6 Day, the day where companies like Akamai, Facebook and Google simultaneously turned on IPv6 to see how it worked, where users were coming from and what connectivity broke down.

World IPv6 Day recap

“Many people assume that everyone surfing Google or Facebook on that day used IPv6. The truth is that unless you had native IPv6 connectivity, you accessed those sites with IPv4 instead,” said IPv6 pioneer and security expert Fernando Gont.

In order to turn on IPv6 for the day, organizations had to add a AAAA DNS record to their main domain for 24 hours and accompany this with measurements, explained IPv6 expert, Silvia Hagen.

Adding these AAAA DNS records to primary domain names causes long timeouts (anywhere between 20-180 seconds) for many users who are not properly connected to IPv6, according to book author and Infoblox vice president of architecture, Cricket Liu. He said, “On World IPv6 Day, these big Web properties … deliberately attach[ed] these IPv6 addresses to those primary domain names to cause this [DNS IPv6 issue].”

One bad IPv6 migration strategy is 6to4 tunneling. Unmanaged 6to4 tunnels are designed to transfer IPv6 packets over the IPv4 Internet, but are renowned for being “flakey … [and] a big source of problems,” said Matt Levine, director of mapping engineering at Akamai Technologies.